Browsing history can aid cancer detection

Microsoft Corp. researchers want to give patients and doctors a new tool in the quest to find cancers earlier: web searches.

Lung cancer can be detected a year prior than it is using current methods of diagnosis in more than one-third of cases by analysing a patient's internet searches for symptoms and demographic data that put them at higher risk, according to research from Microsoft published on Thursday in the journal JAMA Oncology. The study shows it's possible to use search data to give patients or doctors enough reason to seek cancer screenings earlier, improving the prospects for treatment for lung cancer, which is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide.

To train their algorithms, researchers Ryen White and Eric Horvitz scanned anonymous queries in Bing. They took searchers who had asked something that indicated a recent lung cancer diagnosis.

Then they went back over the user's previous searches. They looked for searches such as those related to symptoms, including bronchitis, chest pain and blood in sputum. The researchers reviewed other risk factors such as gender, age, race and whether searchers lived in areas with high levels of asbestos and radon, both of which increase the risk of lung cancer.

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